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They pressed on through the blasted heath, as burnt to ash as the nights were long and dark and cold enough to crack the life out of stone. Walked past the cauterized ribcages of what might have been sheep. He held the boy shivering against him and felt the warm of each frail breath in the dark.

Something woke him. He lay listening. Clattering, like insects. Underscored by an anxious mechanical hum, the voice of no beast but that which man had made to hunt himself. He rose slowly and when he looked back toward the road the first of them were already coming into view.

God, he whispered. He reached and shook the boy, keeping his eyes on the road. They came prancing through the ash. Metal and lithe. Canine parodies jerking their limbs and their headless shoulders at the dead threshold of perception.

Dont look back, he whispered, pulling the boy. The boy was frozen with fear. It's all right. We have to run. They all but fell into the brake tearing through it. Something snarled around his ankle. He grabbed the boy and fell to ground with his arm around him.

The pack came to a sudden halt, yellow digitigrade legs shuddering to a halt. Maybe a hundred feet from them. The boy looked back.

Then silence. The sound of the dogs listening for them. Muttered electronic croaks that might be a perverse speech.

Shh, he said. Shh. They waited. Then with a lurch the motors whined into life and the clanking mindless beasts pressed on. Read the rest

They're figuring out what we really want from a 21st Century deathbot: moves.

When was the last time a human was seen in one of these videos? Perhaps in the next one we'll see a human crawling on all fours over ice, making loud engine noises between terrified whimpers, only for a perfectly stable bipedal robot to lunge in from off-screen and kick it. Then we'll know what has become of the fleshbags at Boston Dynamics. Read the rest

This elegant pup from Boston Dynamics triggered in me, for just a moment, the uncanny recognition of computer graphics. But it isn't rendered: it's a real machine, meeting a new threshold of fluid movement that turns my skepticism in on itself. Instead of being almost fooled into thinking something fake is real, I'm almost fooled into thinking something real is fake. Read the rest

Google is already selling Boston Dynamics, the robotics startup whose nightmarish-yet-adorable battlefield deathbots are already the stuff of internet lore. It acquired the company three years ago.

…behind the scenes a more pedestrian drama was playing out. Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company’s plans. … At the heart of [the] trouble, said a person familiar with the group, was a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo and the unit’s failure to come up with products that could be released in the near term.

Used to test the performance of protective clothing designed for hazardous environments. The video shows initial testing in a chemical protection suit and gas mask. PETMAN has sensors embedded in its skin that detect any chemicals leaking through the suit. The skin also maintains a micro-climate inside the clothing by sweating and regulating temperature.